Was the OKC Bombing a SPLC/FBI Sting Gone Wrong?

Or, in the SPLC's Case, A Sting Gone Right?

The exploitation began at the top

No one has pursued the truth of the Oklahoma City bombing more zealously than Jesse Trentadue. What pulled Trentadue into the case was the “very likely” murder of his brother Kenneth in a Federal Transfer Center in Oklahoma City, four months after the April 1995 bombing. Jesse’s belief is that authorities had Kenneth hanged mistakenly thinking he was the notorious John Doe #2, Timothy McVeigh’s partner in crime.

More than 30 eyewitnesses identified the John Doe #2 character as having been with McVeigh in Oklahoma City in the minutes leading up the blast. Had John Doe #2 proved to be a government informant or an SPLC plant, he would have spoiled the White House-media narrative of a “Republican Revolution” gone awry. With President Clinton denouncing "loud and angry voices" on the air waves, his name-naming apparatchiks could not let McVeigh have an informant as accomplice. In the months after April 19, 1995, John Doe #2 and his look-alikes were living precarious lives.

Those interested in the Trentadue case or the Oklahoma City bombing in general will find no more reliable information source than Margaret Robert’s 2025 book, Blowback: The Untold Story of the FBI and the Oklahoma City Bombing. It pained Roberts and Trentadue both that the operatives responsible for the tragic deaths of 168 people, 169 including Kenneth Trentadue, have gone unpunished. For a short course on John Doe #2, in particular, I have linked to the relevant chapter in my 2026 book Empire of Lies.

The FBI sketch of John Doe #2 before the Bureau got called off the case

Given their knowledge base, I was curious to see what Trentadue and Roberts had to say about the role of the recently indicted Southern Poverty Law Center in the Oklahoma City bombing. In Roberts’s case, it was quite a bit. In a lengthy post on X, Roberts observed, “The federal indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Center has created shockwaves.”

As Roberts noted, “Back in 2004 — twenty-two years before this indictment — Jesse’s landmark FOIA lawsuit alleged that the 1995 OKC bombing was not lone-wolf terror by Timothy McVeigh. It was a failed joint FBI/SPLC sting operation that went horribly wrong.”

I would argue that, from the SPLC’s perspective, the Oklahoma city bombing did not go wrong at all. The SPLC exploited the destruction of the Murrah Building as ruthlessly as it did the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville. For the SPLC, OKC has been the gift that keeps on giving. No anniversary passes without a headline from the SPLC such as “Oklahoma City Bombing: 26 years later, the same extremist threats prevail.” This article was listed under the rubric “Dismantling White Supremacy,” the last thing the SPLC actually wanted dismantled.

The evidence for SPLC involvement in the blast “included a leaked 1996 FBI director teletype showing McVeigh called Elohim City two days before the blast — information the FBI only obtained through an SPLC informant inside the compound.” For the record, Elohim City is a private “Christian Identity” community in Easter Oklahoma that in the 1990s was sort of a Casablanca for terrorist wannabes. Some unhealthy percentage of its residents were, if not terrorists, playing terrorist for some entity, at least two for the SPLC.

Or maybe more. As Roberts noted, “Jesse's FOIA lawsuit forced the FBI to turn over 25 secret files documenting as many as seven SPLC informants reporting to the FBI on the OKC bomb plot.”

Dogged Oklahoma reporter JD Cash, who was featured in Blowback, confronted SPLC founder Morris Dees with evidence that his outfit had deep access in Elohim City, reputed command central for the bomb plot. Dees reportedly responded: “If I told you that, I’d have to kill you.”

Mark Potok paid informants to foment hate so the SPLC could fight it

More concretely, reported Roberts, “SPLC Intelligence Project director Mark Potok called Jesse [Trentadue] and admitted the SPLC had informants — plural — inside Elohim City.” Although Potok quit the SPLC after 20 years, his “Intelligence Project” ran the SPLC’s informant program long enough to face an indictment last month.

Roberts is calling on Congress to release the documents from Jesse Trentadue’s 2004 FOIA lawsuit “unredacted.” Concluded Roberts, “The same rogue surveillance playbook that allegedly produced the deadliest domestic terror attack in American history has been used again and again from the Governor Whitmer kidnap plot to January 6 and beyond. The truth can no longer stay buried.”

Said Trentadue more pointedly, “The SPLC’s urine is all over the Oklahoma City bombing.”

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